Dominican College of San Rafael - Firebrand Yearbook (San Rafael, CA)

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Saint Augustine professed that every human society finds its structural principle in a common will, a will to life, a will to enjoyment, and a will to peace . In The City of God Saint Augustine defines people as a multitude of rational creatures associated in a com- mon agreement as to the things which it loves . If one knows the objects loved, one knows the people and their society, becatise the moral life of the individual and the social life are the same. Saint Augustine ' s sociology is based on the prin- ciples of the all importance of the will and the sover- eignty of love. A striking simile was made by Augus- tine in showing the strength of love. He said that the power of love has the same importance in the spiritual world as the force of gravity possesses in the physical world: As a man ' s love moves him, so must he go . Saint Augustine also claims that all men desire happiness and all seek peace, but not all after one fashion. The only essential difference in the nature of peace and happiness is in his spiritual independence, because man has the power to choose his own good. The natural man, or man of the world, lives for him- self and wishes only a material bliss and a temporal peace. On the other hand, the spiritual man lives for God and seeks a spiritual ecstasy and a lasting peace. Since there were two kinds of men with different ten- 125

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Christ died for all men without exception, and we should pray to Him to give us the peace-makers. How similar this sounds to the theories expressed by Saint Augustine in the fifth century, and how analogous is the condition of the world at that time compared to now. The social dualism in Saint Augus- tine ' s time was a violent antithesis of two opposing orders: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world, Babylon; the present age and the future age; the imperial society of the past and the Christian so- ciety to come. Although these two worlds met and intermingled physically, there was no spiritual as- sociation between them. The Christians, while ming- ling with Babylon, had to recognize the external order of the earthly state which was to the advantage of both ; yet there was no true bond of spiritual fellow- ship or common citizenship between the members of the two societies. In The City of God Saint Augustine warns the people of the fifth century, as Pope Pius XII cautions us fourteen centuries later, about a false peace: The true peace, which is complete and eter- nal, Heaven ' s perfect peace, belongs, however, to the Christians only, now in prospect, then in possession . . . and, whereas there is now but an imperfect rest for the citizen of the worldly city, there will then be a perpetual unrest and continual disquiet. . . . 124

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dencies, two loves built two cities— earthly, which is built up by love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly, which is built up by the love of God to the contempt of self . During his thirty years of ecclesiastical life, Saint Augustine not only carried on a continual warfare against the evil forces from within and without the Church, but he also laid the foundation for much of the Church ' s political thought and attitude toward history. By analyzing the pleas of the Church today for the world to go back to God one can see that, although the words have been rearranged to suit the modern situation, the theory is the same as that which was introduced by Saint Augustine in the fifth cen- tury. The answer then and now: ... for he looked for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God . Eleanor Bernardis ' 49. 126